China school denies link to Google attack: report

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - A Chinese vocational school has denied a report it was a source of recent cyber attacks on Internet giant Google and other U.S. corporations, Xinhua news agency said on Saturday.

“Investigation in the staff found no trace the attacks originated from our school,” Li Zixiang, party chief at Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong Province, was quoted as saying.

The New York Times reported that the attacks, a source of friction in Sino-U.S. relations, had been traced to Lanxiang, which it said was established with support from the Chinese military and trains computer scientists for the military, and to Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Li said Lanxiang had no relationship with the military, Xinhua reported. The party chief also disputed the statement that investigators suspected a link to a computer science class taught at the school by a Ukrainian professor.

“There is no Ukrainian teacher in the school and we have never employed any foreign staff,” Li said. “The report was unfounded. Please show the evidence.”

Lanxiang, founded in 1984, has about 20,000 students learning vocational skills such as cooking, auto repair and hairdressing.

Google announced on January 12 that it had faced a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” in mid-December, allegedly from inside China, and that dissidents’ e-mail accounts were a primary target.